At a party in Hollywood to celebrate the release of a new film, the in-crowd are out in force, milling around a bar decked out like a retro beauty salon.

A DJ spins 1980s dance tracks. Photo­graphers click away at young women in various states of undress, but the only girl in the room they really want to capture is playing hard to get. Sasha Grey stands in one corner, trying to remain inconspicuous. She arrived late, sticks close to the people she knows and leaves early, keeping her coat on and her hood up at all times. 'I’m not very good at parties,’ she says. 'I’m a wallflower.’

She is actually very far from that. Sasha Grey is a porn star. The party was being held to celebrate Live In My Secrets, a new 'adult’ film that Grey appears in, but the paparazzi were drawn there for another reason: she is the star of the new Steven Soderbergh film, The Girlfriend Experience, in which she plays a high-class escort.

Her appearance in a legitimate film by an Oscar-winning director has made her the subject of profiles in Rolling Stone and the Los Angeles Times. She has modelled for American Apparel and this year became the face of the French ready-to-wear label Manoukian. In a few short months, Grey has attained the kind of crossover success that women who work in the adult entertainment industry dream of but hardly ever achieve. Most of that is down to Grey herself. 'She’s kind of a new breed,’ Soderbergh said. 'She doesn’t fit the typical mould of someone who goes into the adult film business.’

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In fact, Grey, 21, doesn’t seem to be porn star material on any level. Fresh-faced and pretty with a slight, girlish figure, she seems bright, attentive and remarkably self-assured. It is the apparent disconnect between all these things and her chosen profession that has generated so much interest in her and has, in part, accelerated her rise.

Two days after the party, she is sitting with her legs curled up under her in the house she shares with her fiance, Ian Cinnamon, a photographer. Tucked away in the Hollywood Hills, it is a proper movie-star residence. The couple moved in last year, and Grey proudly shows off her patio with its Italianate fountain elaborately constructed into the hill that rises up behind the house. Inside, the decor is stylish and understated. There are photographs of Grey, shot by Cinnamon, on almost every wall.

A small space is set aside as an office from which Grey manages almost every aspect of her career, which includes designing and editing her own website. The wall above her desk is dominated by a framed poster for La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film about Maoist student radicals. Grey is obsessive about film and a Godard fanatic. A shelf is laden with books on Hitchcock, Godard and Fellini; another with tomes by Sartre, Nietzsche, de Beauvoir and Burroughs. A cubbyhole off the lounge is racked with shelves that hold hundreds of CDs and DVDs. 'I was attending a theatre group when I was 15,’ she explains, 'and my teacher told me, you have to soak everything up like a sponge. So I got whatever I could put my hands on, which wasn’t easy in Sacramento.’

That theatre group, the Actor’s Workshop of Sacramento, is where she first met Cinnamon, an aspiring filmmaker 13 years her senior; she appeared in an unreleased film project he wrote and directed called Love Thieves. Although she maintains that she never saw porn as a way into mainstream film, Grey clearly harboured acting ambitions.

Steven Soderbergh’s screenwriters, David Levien and Brian Koppel­man, contacted Grey out of the blue through her mySpace page in 2007 after reading about her in a magazine profile.

'I thought it was a trick,’ Grey laughs. 'Then I came home one day and heard a voicemail from Steven Soderbergh.’ She met him at his office on the Warner Brothers lot, they talked for a while, and he offered her the role on the spot. The film was mostly improvised during a two-week shoot in New York last November by a small cast who, apart from Grey, had never appeared on camera before. 'Even though the film’s not very explicit, there’s a comfort level that [Grey] obviously has from making all those films that I think is difficult to fake – there’s a kind of attitude,’ Soderbergh said when the film screened at the Sundance Film Festival in February.

Grey plays Christine, a successful New York escort who runs her own business and believes she has a handle on her complicated life, which involves balancing the demands of her personal relationship (with a fitness trainer) and a profession in which she trades intimacy for money. In order to do so, Christine has developed a tough armour that begins to crack under pressure. Grey denies that she is playing herself, but the story was clearly designed to play on the parallels between her screen persona and her real life. Like her character, she is also self-determined, ambitious and engaged in a profession that can’t help but have an impact on her personal life.

Talking on her own turf, Grey seems relaxed, but circumspect about revealing too much; there is little sense of the frivolous nature one would expect of someone her age but, in its place, a seemingly unassailable confidence. 'I think where I grew up had a large part to do with that. It was a very disenfranchised neighbourhood,’ she says, referring to North Highlands, a gang-heavy working-class suburb of Sacramento. Grey was exposed to the harsh realities of life. 'I saw a lot of people die, a lot of people go to jail. I saw a lot of people become addicted to crystal meth, coke or heroin when they were only 16 or 17.’ Sheer willpower, she believes, prevented her from falling into the same trap – that and her chaotic upbringing, which made her long for the time when she could be independent.

Grey is the youngest of three children. Her brother is nine years her senior, her sister, seven years. Because of that age difference, she says,

'my mentality was always a lot older than my age’. Her parents divorced when she was five, and she and her siblings remained with their mother. From that point on, Grey has had only minimal contact with her father, an odd-job man who, she says, could never hold down a position for long. 'My dad is really just lazy. He has nothing, I feel, to offer this world,’ she says matter-of-factly, but with no hint of malice. Her mother put herself through college while raising three young children in order to obtain a job that would enable her to provide financial stability for her family. She remarried when Grey was 12, but Grey did not get on with her stepfather. She says she compensated for the absence of a father figure by forming stronger emotional bonds with her elder brother and her paternal grandfather, the son of a Greek immigrant who fought in the Second World War. 'He’s just the strongest character I’ve ever met,’ she says.

Grey says she was a tomboy, and one of the last in her circle of friends to lose her virginity. 'Friends told me at the time, you intimidate people just by the way you carry yourself. Boys don’t want to talk to you. They’re afraid you’ll yell at them. Or punch them in the nuts!’ After graduating from high school, she took a job in a steakhouse to pay her way through a film history course at college. While working there she began a relationship with the restaurant cook (eight years her senior) that was instrumental in defining her future path. 'I wasn’t confident in my sexuality but I had these thoughts, these desires and these passions inside me. I never knew how to exorcise them until probably the first time I had sex, and it was a great experience. I felt like, why should I be so hindered about this?’ She began to think about entering the porn industry in order to explore her sexuality further. 'I thought, why should sex have to be dirty or scary? And if it is, why can’t you turn that into a positive thing and work through that sensually and find something good out of that, something pleasurable.’

Women in the sex industry typically move into porn after first working on its periphery, as strippers or glamour models. Grey did neither. Instead, her entry into the industry was a clear and conscious decision. 'I really had it totally planned out for me, by me,’ she asserts. 'I think that was the big difference and I don’t think a whole lot of people have approached porn as seriously as I did… I saw a wide-open door in this business to do something different and change it.’

Still, aware that working in the sex industry held many perils, and determined not to be exploited, she applied herself to finding out everything she could about the industry on the internet first. 'I researched for about eight months before I got into it – all the pros and all the cons.’ If she has had any negative experiences since then, she doesn’t let on.

Unlike in Britain, in America the porn industry has achieved an uneasy alliance with mainstream culture. Last year an article in the Los Angeles Times even identified porn stars as the hottest new commodities in Hollywood, a phenomenon that it says underscores 'pornography’s steady migration over the last three decades from the pop-culture margins to the mainstream’. Since the 1990s, the industry has remade itself from underground culture to pseudo-legitimate corporate entertainment industry, seeking a modicum of respectability by cloaking itself in the glamour afforded by big-budget shoots and its own lavish award ceremonies. It even developed its own star system, in the 'contract girls’ who are signed on an exclusive basis to major porn studios, lending it the same kind of aspirational veneer as its Hollywood counterpart.

The magazine article that first made Soderbergh aware of Grey (then 18, barely six months into her porn career) tipped her as the 'next Jenna Jameson’. Jameson is a household name in America, having parlayed her porn fame into a multi-million-dollar industry that sells everything from DVDs to 'moan tones’ for mobile phones.

Grey, who has clearly modelled herself on Jameson, is striving to position herself as a porn star with a mainstream presence. But she has no illusions that her appearance in Soderbergh’s film is a stepping-stone to Hollywood and neither does she want it to be. 'Anyone with that idea would be a fool,’ she says. As it is, she has been able to stake out a niche for herself and bridge both cultures.

In the past three years Grey has appeared in more than 200 films and become one of porn’s highest-paid performers, giving her a measure of autonomy that is almost unheard of in an industry that is overwhelmingly driven and controlled by men. Earlier this year, she formed a production company, Grey Art, and began to direct her own films. At the same time, she has modelled for magazines such as GQ and Elle and made cameo appearances in films and music videos, and is currently writing a book of 'sex philosophy’.

Ironically, the conceit behind Soderbergh’s film is that women who are engaged in sex work are playing a high-stakes game that, in the long run, they simply can’t win and that any measure of control they may feel they have over their lives – particularly the boundary between their professional and emotional lives – is a product of their own self-delusion. Grey may beg to differ.

Her fiance seems relaxed about her profession but he does not accompany her on set. Cinnamon is quiet and reserved, with a wry sense of humour. Seeing them out together in public, it’s clear that he plays another role: Grey’s unofficial bodyguard. 'He’s definitely a security blanket at certain events,’ Grey confirms. She confesses to finding her new-found fame quite disorientating. 'Sometimes I find myself being very conflicted, not with what I do, but the double persona.’ She also recognises that her increasing fame is beginning to distance her from family and friends. 'I think the idea of me being a pseudo-celebrity to them is hard to grasp because what I do isn’t mainstream, it’s porn.’

Her mother still has a hard time coming to terms with her daughter’s career. 'She definitely doesn’t accept what I do,’ Grey says, 'but it’s funny because she gives me advice like any parent, about things like new tax breaks!’

Grey’s work schedule is now so hectic that she has very little time for herself. 'I don’t want to be looked at. I really want to be a home body,’ she sighs, with no hint of irony.